


Ships of the Fleet

by WhatOtherPlanet



Category: Homeworld
Genre: Gen, Vignettes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-17
Updated: 2018-05-17
Packaged: 2019-05-08 07:27:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14689350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WhatOtherPlanet/pseuds/WhatOtherPlanet
Summary: There is a story in every welded plate. In every rivet and strand of wire. In every melted gunbarrel and every scored launch deck.These are some of them.





	Ships of the Fleet

It's been years.

They've tried again and again to get it right, but at last, the team gives up. They pack away their blueprints, covered in scribbles and crossed-out ideas. They pack away their dull pencils, and their tired, worn-out dreams. They've given it their best shot, and it just wouldn't work.

They accept that, for the rest of time, the Blade Project will be considered nothing but a long failure.

Except.

Kuvara LiirHra stays after the rest of them leave. She's tired, running entirely on caffeine and barely on that. She looks over the plans. She draws them up again, from scratch, checking every step of the process. She finds same flaws they've seen time and time again in testing.

Visions fill her mind. Memories of exploding fighters, of pilots bailing out at the last possible moment, as their craft erupt into vaporized metal. Anxiety quiets, as the walls of the research station shift with the change in temperature nighttime brings, as her comrades fall into bitter slumber.

In the halogen lights of the research base. Kuvara LiirHra has an epiphany.

She takes a new sheet of paper, and begins to draw.  
  


The engineers find her in the morning, asleep across her table. Beneath her is a new design, unlike anything they've worked on so far.

They glance over it skeptically, over Kuvara's sketchy handwriting, her haphazard notes. They're tired. Most of them are Naabali, or S'jett. She's a woman.

They leave, convinced that their comrade spent all night on another flight of fancy. Another failure.

When Kuvara wakes, she finds the post deserted. Below her, is the rough outline of a starfighter.

She feels the morning weigh on her. She shoulders it.

For the next week, the other engineers hardly see her. They have asked for reassignment, turned in their reports and signed the death warrant of the project. But Kuvara's report never comes in. The other engineers start their new projects, beginning work revised engine systems for the Arrow fighter line, improving a design that they _know_ to be useful. Their work is valuable. In the coming journey, it will save the lives of many pilots.

But Kuvara's will save far more.

 

 

At the end of the week, Kuvara staggers into the pilot barracks. She seeks out an old friend, Igris Soban. He's one of the Bomb Jockeys--those pilots who dared to test the last two generations of Blade-class fighters. She asks him if he's willing to fly do it, one last time.

Igris just grins.  
  


The workers in the manufactory balk at Kuvara and Igris. This haggard egghead and this half-cocked flyboy want them to build them a _Blade?_ They're going to refuse outright, but then one of them looks over the schematics. She waves the rest of them over. Many of them are LiirHra, raised in a new tradition of spaceflight engineering, rougher and less refined that the prestigious schools of Naabal and S'jet. They scan Kuvara's work, and their skepticism lifts into slow-building excitement.

This might just work.

 

It isn't until the little ship appears on sensors, heading for the testing sector, that Fleet Intelligence finally takes notice of its existence.

Igris Soban laughs as he twists the little fighter around. It's slower than an Arrow, but there's a fluidity to the movement. He loops, and weaves, and casts cooling plasma across the orbital plane. The target drones come into view, and he annihilates them. The kick of the guns is like thunder in his ears.

 

In Fleet Intelligence, techs watch with open mouths as the test concludes. The IFF tags on the fighter list it as a MK.V Blade.

Someone discovers that, yes, they do have a record of its existence. Filed this morning, buried in a dozen mundane maintenance write-ups. The expense was so tiny they didn't notice the dip in resources.

 

There's debate over whether to write up all of these people for insubordination.

But nobody ever got around to ordering the engineers to _stop_ working on the Blade Project, did they?

 

The night after the test, Kuvara finally gets some sleep.

She may have made a breakthrough, many breakthroughs, but even so, her work is haphazard. The design has problems.

When she wakes, the world is quiet. She's alone, in her bunk in the research station. She blinks the sleep out of her eyes, brushes her teeth, dresses, and walks out her door into a cacophony of sound and color.

Stunned, she only slowly registers the party being thrown in her honor.

It's almost ten minutes later that she even realizes the impact of what she's done.

  


Five years later, Kuvara LiirHra looks out from the window of the research ship as a flight of Blades passes between her and the Mothership. There are sixty-three of them now, the first line of defense of the Mothership as it begins its push into the Great Wastelands.

It's been a long time. So many new sorrows, so many new aches and pains. She feels like a different person, but that's to be expected after all that's happened.

The Blade is different too, adapted as tech advanced and needs shifted. It probably shouldn't even be called the MK.V anymore.

But still, a little swell of pride lifts her.

For all the sorrow in the past, and all the sorrow that is to come, for all the uncertainty and doubt between it all, at least she knows one thing.

Those shining trails of starlight will be her legacy.


End file.
